Crystal Simone Smith — Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention 2025

Crystal Simone Smith is the recipient of a Touchstone Distinguished Books Honorable Mention for 2025 for the volume Runagate: Songs of the Freedom Bound (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025).

Commentary from the Panel:

Like Smith’s earlier “Dark Testament”, which blacks out text from George Saunders’ novel “Lincoln in the Bardo” to create elegies for Black citizens murdered by police, her powerful “Runagate” combines rigorous truth-telling about the trauma of slavery with ambitious formal experimentation. Her project is, itself, conceptually brilliant: to research artifacts of slavery, then bring the voices of enslaved people to imaginative life in haiku and related forms. Accounts in the Library of Congress, as well as a database of ads at Cornell University of slaveholders trying to recapture runaway slaves, are transformed into a compelling and ambitious set of haiku and renku sequences, tanka, and haibun. 

Some of the most effective work occurs in the opening section, where a carefully curated set of slave owner’s ads are presented verbatim on the verso page with Smith’s poems on the recto. The rawness of the racist mind in its cruelty and venality evokes Simone Weil’s term “banality of evil”.  This discourse pressures the haiku, making it carry enormous emotional and narrative weight. Sometimes in the service of complex story, the discrete identity of haiku as haiku is elided and a sequence feels more like a unified, sinewy narrative poem, which may be a worthy trade off. Sometimes that risk pays dividends in forging haiku that flash with harrowing intensity:  

for it all

I was flogged

as he recited scripture

 . . .

spring auction

a slave named

  Mourning

. . .

on the move

the blessing

of morning fog

. . .

tied their feet

in bundles of rags

to leave no tracks

. . .

near dawn

my back aching

in barn warmth

. . .

the river’s

chattering run

a moonlit map

Smith’s work brings these self-liberating Black men and women to visceral life. Her strength as a writer includes her empathetic voicing of multiple personae and her creation of a vocabulary that bears the cadence of the past, while maintaining contemporary immediacy. Beyond this, she has also shaped the haiku sequence and other related forms into a contemporary response to the genre of slave narrative. 

Bruce H. Feingold

Distinguished Books Award Coordinator

THF strives to maintain a safe and friendly environment for our readers and site participants. Participation in our offerings assumes respectful and appropriate behavior of all parties. We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, for any reason, at any time. 

If you see something you feel may violate our Code of Conduct, please report it to the appropriate moderator or the President here.

See the complete list of winners of both Individual Poem Awards and Distinguished Books Awards in the Touchstone Archives.